-LRB- CNN -RRB- -- Sitting incongruously among the hangars and laboratories of NASA 's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley is the squat facade of an old McDonald 's . You wo n't get a burger there , though -- its cash registers and soft-serve machines have given way to old tape drives and modern computers run by a rogue team of hacker engineers who 've rechristened the place McMoon 's . These self-described techno-archaeologists have been on a mission to recover and digitize forgotten photos taken in the '60s by a quintet of scuttled lunar satellites .

The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project -LRB- LOIRP -RRB- has since 2007 brought some 2,000 pictures back from 1,500 analog data tapes . They contain the first high-resolution photographs ever taken from behind the lunar horizon , including the first photo of an earthrise -LRB- first slide above -RRB- . Thanks to the technical savvy and DIY engineering of the team at LOIRP , it 's being seen at a higher resolution than was ever previously possible .

`` We 're reaching back to a capability that existed but could n't be touched back when it was created , '' says Keith Cowing , co-lead and founding member at LOIRP . `` It 's like having a DVD in 1966 , you ca n't play it . We had resolution of the Earth of about a kilometer -LSB- per pixel -RSB- . This is an image taken a quarter of a f *** king million miles away in 1966 . The Beatles were warming up to play Shea Stadium at the moment it was being taken . ''

Between 1966 and ' 67 , five Lunar Orbiters snapped pictures onto 70mm film from about 30 miles above the moon . The satellites were sent mainly to scout potential landing sites for manned moon missions . Each satellite would point its dual lens Kodak camera at a target , snap a picture , then develop the photograph . High - and low-resolution photos were then scanned into strips called framelets using something akin to an old fax machine reader .

The images were beamed in modulated signals to one of three receiving stations in Australia , Spain , or California , where the pictures -- and collateral chatter from the NASA operators -- were recorded straight to tape . After finishing their missions , the satellites were unceremoniously dashed against the moon rocks , clearing the way for Apollo . The brilliant and ballsy engineering was typical of NASA during its golden age , a time when it was also more closely linked to other government agencies with an interest in taking pictures from space .

`` These guys were operating right at the edge , '' Cowing says with a reverence for these NASA engineers that 's shared by his team . `` There 's a certain spy program heritage to all this , but these guys went above that , because those spy satellites would send their images back . These did n't . They could n't . They were in lunar orbit . ''

Fascinating Ways People Try to Leave Their Mark on the World

The photos were stored with remarkably high fidelity on the tapes , but at the time had to be copied from projection screens onto paper , sometimes at sizes so large that warehouses and even old churches were rented out to hang them up . The results were pretty grainy , but clear enough to identify landing sites and potential hazards . After the low-fi printing , the tapes were shoved into boxes and forgotten .

They changed hands several times over the years , almost getting tossed out before landing in storage in Moorpark , California . Several abortive attempts were made to recover data from the tapes , which were well kept , but it was n't until 2005 that NASA engineer Keith Cowing and space entrepreneur Dennis Wingo were able to bring the materials and the technical know how together .

When they learned through a Usenet group that former NASA employee Nancy Evans might have both the tapes and the super-rare Ampex FR-900 drives needed to read them , they jumped into action . They drove to Los Angeles , where the refrigerator-sized drives were being stored in a backyard shed surrounded by chickens . At the same time , they retrieved the tapes from a storage unit in nearby Moorpark , and things gradually began to take shape . Funding the project out of pocket at first , they were consumed with figuring out how to release the images trapped in the tapes .

`` We 're both Apollo babies , so the moon to us was something that 's unfinished business , '' says Cowing . `` These tapes were sealed for history by somebody who cared , and it was astonishing the condition they were in . So we started buying used parts on eBay , Radioshack -- I was sitting at a black-tie reception at one point buying something on my iPhone . We just buy and reassemble these things bit by bit . ''

The drives had to be rebuilt and in some cases completely re-engineered using instruction manuals or the advice of people who used to service them . The data they recovered then had to be demodulated and digitized , which added more layers of technical difficulties .

The resulting framelets had to be individually reassembled in Photoshop . After kluging through countless engineering problems -LRB- try finding a chemical substitute for whale oil to lubricate tape heads -RRB- , the LOIRP team was able to single out and reproduce the famous earthrise image . This proof of concept brought the first NASA funding in 2008 , and the team recently completed processing the entire tape collection .

`` We 're the first people out of a generation or more to see this , '' says Cowing . `` No human eye had ever seen this . All they saw was something that had already been through one generation of copying . We 're seeing something one order of magnitude more precise right on the screen . ''

Since the '60s , a series of Earth and moon imaging satellites have launched , including the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2009 . Despite the advances in computing power and optics , Cowing says the terabytes of images recovered at LOIRP are often even more detailed than those taken by LRO , capable of being blown up to billboard size without losing resolution .

`` A lot of the images they 're taking today , our imagery from 1966 and '67 has sometimes greater resolution and greater dynamic range because of the way the pictures were taken . So sometimes you look into a shadow in a picture that LRO 's taken , and you do n't see any detail -- with ours , you do . ''

Officially named Building 596 , McMoon 's flies a flag bearing the distinct Skunkworks skull and crossbones , signaling the team 's hacker ethic . The seven or so people tinkering away inside maintain an open-source mentality about their work , making all images and their technological discoveries free to the public . They also have plans for a decommissioned Titan ICBM that 's sitting outside -LRB- for students , of course -RRB- .

McMoon 's has grown into a highly specialized operation , stuffed with a melange of old and new technology now put to use in decoding various NASA and Library of Congress tapes that no one knows what to do with . With a built-in ability to handle hazardous chemicals , the old McDonald 's made practical sense , but it also gave them a layer of distance to carry out their weird work .

`` I had a choice between the barbershop and this building -- we did n't really care what sort of building they gave us , we just did n't want to pay for it , '' Cowing says . `` The surplus folks at NASA Ames where all the old computers and stuff go , they love us because we come over and make all the old stuff work . The safety guys come by and we usually either make them our friends or bark at them and they do n't come back . ''

The images gathered at LOIRP have been coerced into providing even more information than they were intended to . Their data have been used to correct figures from the time about Earth 's arctic ice levels , and have helped identify an El Nino-type event in the '60s . All the images and the information gathered from them are being fed into the Planetary Data System , an official repository where mission data from LRO , Mars Observer , Climate Orbiter , and many others are documented .

Started by the same Nancy Evans that provided the tape drives , the Planetary Data System did n't exist when the Lunar Orbiter pictures were initially taken . The images and information that LOIRP has recovered will be submitted as the official record of the original sattelite mission . It 's a testament to the lasting work of the engineers who designed the orbiter missions , and the tenacity of the modern techno archaeologists who are bringing that work to full fruition .

`` Back then things were designed , even if they failed , to still do something . Today , most jet fighters would fall out of the sky if they did n't have computers adjusting their surfaces and their pattern thousands of times a second . Back then they just had to engineer stuff elegantly so that it worked , '' he says . `` We feel that we 're completing the Lunar Orbiter 1 through 5 missions . They never formally submitted their stuff for the archives so we 're doing it . ''

Read more from WIRED :

What Exactly Is in McDonald 's Famous French Fries ?

Why You Always Seem to Choose the Slowest Line

People Around the World Pose With Everything They Eat in a Day

Why Does Sleeping In Just Make Me More Tired ?

30 Years After Chernobyl 's Meltdown , Gripping Photos Expose the Human Fallout

Subscribe to WIRED magazine for less than $ 1 an issue and get a FREE GIFT ! Click here !

Copyright 2011 Wired.com .

@highlight

NASA-funded project has recovered 2,000 analog moon pictures

@highlight

The images were taken by the five Lunar Orbiter images between 1966 and 1967

@highlight

Project uses old and modern technology to produce high-res copies of the originals .